Birds, Bees, Fish

Two zoologists walked into a bar. They were guests at a reception for their friend Isabella Rossellini, the actress and model, whose latest project, “Green Porno,” is a series of one-to-three-minute-long films about animal reproduction. “When we first met, she was next to me at a dinner party, and she told me that what she always wanted to be was a zoologist,” one of them, Joshua Ginsberg, a vice-president at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said of Rossellini. “She grew up with a man named Luigi Boitani.”

“Oh, wolves!” the other, Natalie Cash, a former producer of animal documentaries, said.

“She thought about studying wolves with Luigi in Italy,” Ginsberg said. “And her greatest regret was not pursuing it.”

Rossellini had just finished the second season of “Green Porno,” which is half comical and half educational, and has won the approval of some conservationists. Rossellini writes, directs, and stars, wearing colorful arts-and-craftsy costumes. The first season received nearly four million hits on YouTube and on the Web site of the Sundance Channel. It focussed on insects and other garden-dwelling creatures: praying mantises, dragonflies, earthworms. The second season is about marine life, which Rossellini has described as “more scandalous than bugs”—an assertion that Ginsberg questioned, citing the fact that female spiders eat their mates after sex.

“Bugs are where it’s at,” Ginsberg said. “Fish are sort of interesting, because some of them start out as boys and turn into girls. But, basically, mammals are really boring.” The room was full of mammals dressed in black, awaiting a screening of some of the new episodes. Ginsberg turned to face Cash and said, “Are we going to see shrimp tonight?”

“I think we’re going to see shrimp,” she said.

“We’re not seeing my favorite, which is squid,” Ginsberg said.

“Squid is awesome, yeah.”

Mammals, boring though their sexual practices may be, nonetheless offer plenty of taxonomic possibilities, and the conservationists soon addressed the role of habitat in classifying a subspecies of “green” celebrity. “The difference between New York actors and L.A. actors—and I’ll get in lots of trouble for saying this—” Ginsberg began. “But do we have any L.A. actors on the zoo’s board still?”

“No, they’re gone now,” Cash said.

“New York actors have this amazing complexity and intelligence,” Ginsberg went on. “And I think Isabella, a New Yorker, is astonishing for being, quote, the most beautiful woman in the world and not letting it go to her head.”

“When she came to screenings at the zoo, she took the train up—the subway!” Cash said. “I’m trying to think of how I would compare the message in this show to, like, the latest Pamela Anderson Kentucky Fried Cruelty ad, where you think it’s going to be the next sex video.” Pamela Anderson does work for PETA, which, as it happens, is engaged in its own ocean-awareness campaign, attempting to rebrand fish as cuddly “sea kittens.”

“I feel like if this was L.A. she would be popping out of a cake now,” Cash said, gesturing toward Rossellini, who was fully clothed and mingling, preparing to introduce the first segment, called “Why Vagina?,” with a shout-out to Ginsberg. (“I gave her a book on mammalian genitalia,” he explained.) Next came shorts in which Rossellini was dressed as a whale, a limpet, an anglerfish, and a barnacle—which turns out to have the largest penis of all, relative to its body size. Rossellini’s barnacle costume included a twenty-foot-long extension.